it be social; that is, as different as possible from all the big
commercial departments of to-day. The really good journeyman tailor does
not cut his coat according to his cloth; he asks for more cloth. The
really practical statesman does not fit himself to existing conditions, he
denounces the conditions as unfit. History is like some deeply planted
tree which, though gigantic in girth, tapers away at last into tiny twigs;
and we are in the topmost branches. Each of us is trying to bend the tree
by a twig: to alter England through a distant colony, or to capture the
State through a small State department, or to destroy all voting through a
vote. In all such bewilderment he is wise who resists this temptation of
trivial triumph or surrender, and happy (in an echo of the Roman poet) who
remembers the roots of things.




THE NAMELESS MAN


There are only two forms of government the monarchy or personal government,
and the republic or impersonal government. England is not a government;
England is an anarchy, because there are so many kings. But there is one
real advantage (among many real disadvantages) in the method of abstract
democracy, and that is this: that under impersonal government politics are
so much more personal. In France and America, where the State is an
abstraction, political argument is quite full of human details--some might
even say of inhuman details. But in England, precisely because we are
ruled by personages, these personages do not permit personalities. In
England names are honoured, and therefore names are suppressed. But in
the republics, in France especially, a man can put his enemies' names into